Internet of Things (IoT) is driving the need for multiple wireless network interfaces of different radio technologies in IoT platforms. This is especially relevant for IoT gateway platforms that communicate with multiple sensors and IoT devices for data aggregation and processing and also for communication with the cloud. Existing IoT gateway platforms face a number of challenges.
One challenge faced by some existing IoT gateways is the need so support and dynamically switch among multiple radio technologies, such as Bluetooth®, Bluetooth® Low Energy (“BLE”), ZigBee®, WiFi, cellular 2G, 3G and 4G, and 5G in the near future. Sensors and IoT devices equipped with multiple radio technologies create the need for IoT gateways to switch between different radio interfaces during the communication with these devices.
Another challenge faced by some existing IoT gateways is the need to deal with diverse types of data for diverse types of applications with diverse requirements (e.g., mission critical applications, real-time applications, smart-metering, video surveillance, etc.), which requires adaptive choice of the connectivity type to the cloud to meet the applications requirements and Service Level Agreement (SLA) with Service Providers (SPs).
Yet another challenge faced by some existing IoT gateways is the need to deal with different data throughput requirements for each of various IoT devices and sensors (e.g., some sensors emit 3 bytes per second while video cameras can emit 2 Mbps), which creates the need for bandwidth usage arbitration for each chosen connectivity type in a cost efficient way.
Currently, there is no solution in IoT platforms that addresses the above shortcomings.